Abstract
Women have historically been excluded from science. The world’s major scientific academies were founded in the 17th century —the Royal Society of London (the oldest continuous society of science) in 1660, the Parisian Académie royale des Sciences (perhaps the most prestigious academy of science) in 1666, the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin in 1700. These academies first admitted women in the 20th century — the Royal Society admitted Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson in 1945, the Berlin Academy admitted Lise Meitner in 1949 but only as a corresponding member. The Académie des Sciences in Paris did not admit a woman until 1979 and even she was a “safe” woman, the daughter of a prominent mathematician and the wife of an academy member.1
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Endnotes
Much of the material in this chapter is derived from my The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). The reader is referred to that work for fuller arguments and specific references.
The term “sexual science” I have adopted from Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Andrew Purvis, “A Perilous Gap,” Women: The Road Ahead, special issue, Time (Fall, 1990): pp. 66–67.
Jakob Ackermann, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe ausser Geschlechtstheilen, trans. Joseph Wenzel (Koblenz: 1788).
See Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1991), chap. 17.
Suzanne Kessler, “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,” in From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference, special issue, Signs 16 (Autumn 1990): 3–26.
Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: Some Strategies of Resistance to Biological Determinism,” unpublished manuscript, Columbia University and Cornell University. See also Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).
See Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Science,” in The Politics of Difference, ed. Felicity Nuss-baum, special issue, Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 387–406.
There is much valuable literature on this topic; see, for example, Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, eds., Biological Woman — The Convenient Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1982)
Janet Sayers, Biological Politics (London: Tavistock Publications, 1982)
Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1984)
Steven Rose, Leon Kamin, and Richard Lewontin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (London: 1984)
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986)
Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987)
Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)
Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985)
Ruth Bleier, ed., Feminist Approaches to Science (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1986)
Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986)
Sandra Harding and Jean O’Barr, eds., Sex and Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987)
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989)
Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Proctor, Value-Free Science?
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Schiebinger, L.L. (1992). The Gendered Brain: Some Historical Perspectives. In: Harrington, A. (eds) So Human a Brain. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0391-9_7
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